![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Aug. 6th, 2008
While using the nginx webserver with a Drupal installation I noticed something odd. Whenever I submitted a form (with the GET method) or clicked on a link that had a space in it, it would be converted to a plus sign in the URL. Actually, that's not the odd path--the web browser is doing proper URL encoding since spaces are not allowed in URLs.
The weird part is that after the request got to the webserver, and the server processed it and passed it to PHP, and PHP loaded Drupal and executed the PHP code, the plus sign failed to be turned back into a space when using the nginx webserver. Works fine in Apache, but not in nginx.
The symptom is that if I tried to perform a search or edit my user profile, or anything else that involved a plus sign in the GET data, when that data was processed by PHP, the plus sign was still there. i.e., I would see "term1+term2" in the search box, instead of "term1 term2".
So, how to fix this? I could have spent some time reading RFCs, and looking through the source from PHP and nginx, or I could have my site working again. I opted for the latter, and found that this line of code at the very beginning of Drupal's index.php seems to do the trick:
It's silly, and may even be a bit stupid, but it sure does the trick.
The weird part is that after the request got to the webserver, and the server processed it and passed it to PHP, and PHP loaded Drupal and executed the PHP code, the plus sign failed to be turned back into a space when using the nginx webserver. Works fine in Apache, but not in nginx.
The symptom is that if I tried to perform a search or edit my user profile, or anything else that involved a plus sign in the GET data, when that data was processed by PHP, the plus sign was still there. i.e., I would see "term1+term2" in the search box, instead of "term1 term2".
So, how to fix this? I could have spent some time reading RFCs, and looking through the source from PHP and nginx, or I could have my site working again. I opted for the latter, and found that this line of code at the very beginning of Drupal's index.php seems to do the trick:
$_GET["q"] = strtr($_GET["q"], "+", " ");
It's silly, and may even be a bit stupid, but it sure does the trick.